I'm reading Patrick Lane's There is a Season about a year in his garden spent recovering from a life of alcoholism and drug abuse. It's fascinating and heartbreaking. What might be most disturbing is his description of his first drink when he was about twelve and his parents were out for a New Years Eve party. He mixes up some leftover alcohol he finds in the house and passes out on the kitchen floor. But he likes the feeling.

Lane has endured a harrowing emotional life, but he tells the story so matter-of-factly and with such beauty, even the awful parts. It reminds me of David Adams Richards on CBC radio one night, talking about a line from Dostoevsky: Beauty will save the world.

It's Lane's ability to see the beauty in the small world of his garden and even in the love that his father tried to show him so horribly and imperfectly that saves Lane.

Tragedy has beauty in it and that has to be one of the reasons that artists keep trying to portray it, not to be bleak, but to continue to have hope.